Pressure on application release cycles over the last few years has been steadily mounting. Thanks to increased demand for mobile computing applications, many organizations have significantly quickened the pace at which they develop custom applications. Looking over the horizon, however, it’s also apparent that the rate at which applications will be released and updated is about to exponentially increase as more and more organizations are moving to embrace microservices architectures.

The macro-economic driver of this shift is the rise of digital business. Organizations of all sizes are rushing to create deeper relationships with customers via business processes that now largely occur online. Not only does that shift increase the number of applications that need to be developed, it also creates a requirement to enhance the customer experience by regularly updating those applications.

From Monoliths to MicroservicesThe primary methodology for building and updating applications will be microservices architectures based on containers. Instead of building and deploying a small number of monolithic applications, the future of enterprise IT will be defined by modular sets of code that are significantly easier to build, deploy and manage completely independent of each other. Those modules in turn will be integrated with one another via application programming interfaces (APIs) within the context of a microservices architecture.

It’s not especially hard to imagine how challenging it will be to update applications based on containers. Rather than updating applications by essentially patching them, a microservices architecture based on containers delivers new functionality by replacing one set of containers with another. As the number of applications that access any given set of containers increases, so too will the challenges associated with identifying and managing dependencies between various containers.

Microservices as a Driver of Application Release ManagementThe rise of microservices based on containers will arguably become a major driver of increased adoption of application release management platforms. In fact, by 2020 Gartner forecasts that at least 50 percent of global enterprises will have deployed at least one application release automation solution.

Increased usage of application release automation should go a long way to alleviating what is already a major pain point for most IT organizations. A recent Global Modern Service Delivery Benchmark Survey published by Forrester found that only four percent of respondents tell us that the business is very satisfied with the time it takes to release new features or changes to customers.

In the absence of any way to deploy applications into production environments faster it could turn out the adoption of microservices may very well exacerbate application backlogs. Developers will simply be cranking out more code at a rate IT operations teams will not have a means of being able to keep pace with. Rather than passively waiting for that inevitable rise to occur, IT organizations would be well-advised to start putting the process in place to handle what promises to be a several orders of magnitude increase in application releases.

Riding the Microservices WaveWhile application release automation platforms will undoubtedly be a crucial component of a modern microservices environment, there is of course no substitute for a well-defined set of processes. The actual challenge facing IT organizations will be implementing a framework that both developers and IT operations teams can easily embrace. Instead of forcing everyone in the IT organization to immediately take on a new role, that framework needs to empower IT professionals by augmenting their respective strengths.

Alas, most IT operations teams today are ill-prepared for the rise of microservices. The good news is that it’s still relatively early in terms of microservices adoption. At the same time, it’s also clear that developers being goaded by business executives to increase the rate at which applications are rolled out and updated are about the force the issue. There can be no digital business strategy without increased dependency on microservices. In fact, the difference between being swamped by versus riding that wave of microservices will almost inevitably come down to the level of automated application release management applied before that wave of microservices soon hits.

XebiaLabs is the technology leader for automation software for DevOps and Continuous Delivery. It focuses on helping companies accelerate the delivery of new software in the most efficient manner. Its products are simple to use, quick to implement, and provide robust enterprise technology.

At its core DevOps is all about collaboration. The lines of communication must be opened and it takes some effort to ensure that they stay that way. It’s easy to pay lip service to trends and talk about implementing new methodologies, but without action, real benefits cannot be realized. Success requires planning, advocates empowered to effect change, and, of course, the right tooling.
To bring about a cultural shift it’s important to share challenges. In simple terms, ensuring that everyone k...

Is advanced scheduling in Kubernetes achievable?Yes, however, how do you properly accommodate every real-life scenario that a Kubernetes user might encounter? How do you leverage advanced scheduling techniques to shape and describe each scenario in easy-to-use rules and configurations? In his session at @DevOpsSummit at 21st Cloud Expo, Oleg Chunikhin, CTO at Kublr, answered these questions and demonstrated techniques for implementing advanced scheduling. For example, using spot instances and co...

Today most companies are adopting or evaluating container technology - Docker in particular - to speed up application deployment, drive down cost, ease management and make application delivery more flexible overall.
As with most new architectures, this dream takes significant work to become a reality. Even when you do get your application componentized enough and packaged properly, there are still challenges for DevOps teams to making the shift to continuous delivery and achieving that reducti...

Skeuomorphism usually means retaining existing design cues in something new that doesn’t actually need them. However, the concept of skeuomorphism can be thought of as relating more broadly to applying existing patterns to new technologies that, in fact, cry out for new approaches.
In his session at DevOps Summit, Gordon Haff, Senior Cloud Strategy Marketing and Evangelism Manager at Red Hat, discussed why containers should be paired with new architectural practices such as microservices rathe...

With the rise of Docker, Kubernetes, and other container technologies, the growth of microservices has skyrocketed among dev teams looking to innovate on a faster release cycle. This has enabled teams to finally realize their DevOps goals to ship and iterate quickly in a continuous delivery model. Why containers are growing in popularity is no surprise — they’re extremely easy to spin up or down, but come with an unforeseen issue.
However, without the right foresight, DevOps and IT teams may lo...

Kubernetes is a new and revolutionary open-sourced system for managing containers across multiple hosts in a cluster. Ansible is a simple IT automation tool for just about any requirement for reproducible environments.
In his session at @DevOpsSummit at 18th Cloud Expo, Patrick Galbraith, a principal engineer at HPE, will discuss how to build a fully functional Kubernetes cluster on a number of virtual machines or bare-metal hosts. Also included will be a brief demonstration of running a Galer...

DevOps is under attack because developers don’t want to mess with infrastructure. They will happily own their code into production, but want to use platforms instead of raw automation. That’s changing the landscape that we understand as DevOps with both architecture concepts (CloudNative) and process redefinition (SRE).
Rob Hirschfeld’s recent work in Kubernetes operations has led to the conclusion that containers and related platforms have changed the way we should be thinking about DevOps and...

In his session at 20th Cloud Expo, Mike Johnston, an infrastructure engineer at Supergiant.io, will discuss how to use Kubernetes to setup a SaaS infrastructure for your business. Mike Johnston is an infrastructure engineer at Supergiant.io with over 12 years of experience designing, deploying, and maintaining server and workstation infrastructure at all scales. He has experience with brick and mortar data centers as well as cloud providers like Digital Ocean, Amazon Web Services, and Rackspace....

"There is a huge interest in Kubernetes. People are now starting to use Kubernetes and implement it," stated Sebastian Scheele, co-founder of Loodse, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at DevOps at 19th Cloud Expo, held November 1-3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.

Modern software design has fundamentally changed how we manage applications, causing many to turn to containers as the new virtual machine for resource management. As container adoption grows beyond stateless applications to stateful workloads, the need for persistent storage is foundational - something customers routinely cite as a top pain point. In his session at @DevOpsSummit at 21st Cloud Expo, Bill Borsari, Head of Systems Engineering at Datera, explored how organizations can reap the bene...

Applications with high availability requirements must be deployed to multiple clusters to ensure reliability. Historically, this has been done by pulling nodes from other availability zones into the same cluster. However, if the cluster failed, the application would still become unavailable. Rancher’s support for multi-cluster applications is a significant step forward, solving this problem by allowing users to select the application and the target clusters, providing cluster specific data. Rancher then initiates deployment to those clusters.

Applications with high availability requirements must be deployed to multiple clusters to ensure reliability. Historically, this has been done by pulling nodes from other availability zones into the same cluster. However, if the cluster failed, the application would still become unavailable. Rancher’s support for multi-cluster applications is a significant step forward, solving this problem by all...

Eggplant, the customer experience optimization specialist, announced the latest enhancements to its Digital Automation Intelligence (DAI) Suite. The new capabilities augment Eggplant’s continuous intelligent automation by making it simple and quick for teams to test the performance and usability of their products as well as basic functionality, delivering a better user experience that drives busin...

At its core DevOps is all about collaboration. The lines of communication must be opened and it takes some effort to ensure that they stay that way. It’s easy to pay lip service to trends and talk about implementing new methodologies, but without action, real benefits cannot be realized. Success requires planning, advocates empowered to effect change, and, of course, the right tooling.
To bring ...

Is advanced scheduling in Kubernetes achievable?Yes, however, how do you properly accommodate every real-life scenario that a Kubernetes user might encounter? How do you leverage advanced scheduling techniques to shape and describe each scenario in easy-to-use rules and configurations? In his session at @DevOpsSummit at 21st Cloud Expo, Oleg Chunikhin, CTO at Kublr, answered these questions and de...

Conor Delanbanque has been involved with building & scaling teams in the DevOps space globally. He is the Head of DevOps Practice at MThree Consulting, a global technology consultancy. Conor founded the Future of DevOps Thought Leaders Debate. He regularly supports and sponsors Meetup groups such as DevOpsNYC and DockerNYC.

As you know, enterprise IT conversation over the past year have often centered upon the open-source Kubernetes container orchestration system. In fact, Kubernetes has emerged as the key technology -- and even primary platform -- of cloud migrations for a wide variety of organizations.
Kubernetes is critical to forward-looking enterprises that continue to push their IT infrastructures toward ma...

At CloudEXPO Silicon Valley, June 24-26, 2019, Digital Transformation (DX) is a major focus with expanded DevOpsSUMMIT and FinTechEXPO programs within the DXWorldEXPO agenda. Successful transformation requires a laser focus on being data-driven and on using all the tools available that enable transformation if they plan to survive over the long term. A total of 88% of Fortune 500 companies from a ...

The use of containers by developers -- and now increasingly IT operators -- has grown from infatuation to deep and abiding love. But as with any long-term affair, the honeymoon soon leads to needing to live well together ... and maybe even getting some relationship help along the way. And so it goes with container orchestration and automation solutions, which are rapidly emerging as the means to m...

Today most companies are adopting or evaluating container technology - Docker in particular - to speed up application deployment, drive down cost, ease management and make application delivery more flexible overall.
As with most new architectures, this dream takes significant work to become a reality. Even when you do get your application componentized enough and packaged properly, there are sti...

Here to help unpack insights into the new era of using containers to gain ease with multi-cloud deployments are our panelists: Matt Baldwin, Founder and CEO at StackPointCloud, based in Seattle; Nic Jackson, Developer Advocate at HashiCorp, based in San Francisco, and Reynold Harbin, Director of Product Marketing at DigitalOcean, based in New York. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, prin...

Microservices Journal focuses on the business and technology of the software architecture design pattern, in which complex applications are composed of small, independent processes communicating with each other using language-agnostic APIs.

Cloud computing budgets worldwide are reaching into the hundreds of billions of dollars, and no organization can survive long without some sort of cloud migration strategy. Each month brings new announcements, use cases, and success stories.